I wonder when the U.S. Internal Revenue Service will require online gaming companies to report the earnings of players? At least some MMORG players are starting to worry about this issue.
The extent that virtual economies let "players" perform virtual jobs and earn virtual money that can be used to buy valuable products and services is the extent such virtual income is taxable. If enough players earn more money online than they pay in monthly fees, then said players are effectively gainfully employeed and profitable. If the virtual money is exchangable for real money, then it becomes much more likely that the IRS could get interested.
Hmmm... do virtual earnings count as earnings in foreign country?
Although we may all rant and rave about the wasted resources in big companies, scale does matter in the PC industry.
1. Amortizing R&D: It costs money to develop and document a new PC (learning the vagaries of drivers, interactions with myriad software packages, and cranky connections to all the possible peripherals that customers might have). The more PCs you sell, the more you get to spread this fixed cost over the customer base. (Even if you, Mr.NewPC Inc., wants to ignore this, the vendors that must supply you with engineering data and support won't).
2. Uncertainty of Sales: If you expect to sell 10,000 PCs tommorow, then the basic statistics of random arrivals of orders means that there is a 95% chance of recieving betwen 9,800 and 10,200 orders. So, you order parts for 200 extra systems (2%) provides cover in case of high demand. If demand is low, you can sell the extra 400 systems in the first few minutes of the following day. On the other hand, if you expect to only sell 25 PCs tomorrow, then these same statistical issues mean that there is a 95% chance of recieving between 15 and 35 orders. To cover the same range, you need to order 40% more parts than the average expected sales and a low demand day leaves you with 20 extra systems (almosty a full day's sales) sitting in inventory.
3. Marketing Costs: If you want to be the next Dell, you need to tell people about you. A nationally broadcast ad costs the same regardless of whether you sell millions of PCs per year or only a few PCs per year. Maybe you can find more targetted ad outlets. Maybe you can rely on word of month (although given that most dissatisfied customers are more vocal than satisfied one, word of mouth is a dicy strategy). EVen if the ad is targetted, the creation of the ad is stil a fixed cost that gets divided by the number of PCs you sell.
I'm not saying that small Mon&Pop PC companies don't have a niche (some customers will always be willing to pay more in order to buy face to face from someone they know locally). I'm only saying that big PC makers have advantages in scale.
Most of the features the telco's add are things that are just not well suited to the small form factor of a cellphone
Amen! The user interface for cellphones epitomizes the worst possible combination of design compromises -- trying to deliver a cognitively rich array of features in an inscrutably tiny screen space. Customers demand the smallest lightest possible handset and then are disappointed when the screen is unreadably small, the buttons are unusably close-packed, and the battery life (under real use) is pathetically short. Perhaps when eyeglass screens and virtual keybaords appear, then we will be able to enjoy full internet services in a visually large space.
The layered approach to internet infrastructure is a great technological solution for decoupling the physical mechanisms for moving data, the protocols for managing data movements, and the high-level applications that rely on that data. Layers create natural zones of standardization and enable any application to run on any network.
But that technological architecture is a business model nightmare. All of the costs reside in the lowest physical layers. All those wires, fibers, amplifiers, and switches cost big bucks. Unfortunately, all of the value lies in the highest, application layers. Users want the application and don't care about the physical infrastructure. A layered architecture gaurantees that users don't have to care because the lower layers are interchangable and invisible.
The result is cut-throat price competition among infrastructure service providers (and the associated miles of dark fiber, negative earnings, high debt, and bankruptcies). Meanwhile, the application providers reap the profits while the infrastructure providers can't justify the expense of solving the last mile problem.
Its not that users don't want the telco's acronym soup of next-gen features, it's that they don't want to pay for those features. Providers are desperately seeking the fabled "killer app" that makes subscribers shell out another $29.95/mo. But consumers are tired of expanding monthly bills. And it doesn't help when companies slather on an encyclopedia of restrictions, fees, and service charges.
But you overlooked a small point. Tech tends to concentrate in urban centers because that's where the talent pool is. (And of course, the talent is available only in urban centers because that's where the jobs are.
Good point! You are right that engineering/programming jobs will flow into urban areas because of the high concentration of educated people and that educated people will flow into urban areas because of the high concentration of high-paying jobs. Yet telecommuting enables many other types of jobs that could be hosted in far flung, low-cost, rural areas.
The most likely rural white collar telecommuting jobs would be unskilled or low-skill ones like call centers, entry-level customer support (with escalation to the more skilled, more expensive urban helpdesks), basic data entry, etc. Back in the late 90s British Telecom used telecommuting rural Scottish housewives for operator assistance. And in the U.S., some call centers relocated to mid-West farm towns for their lower cost of labor. Many of these jobs require little more than basic literacy (the ability to read a phone script or simple helpdesk resolution menu) and a VoIP internet terminal.
What's to stop terrorists for distorting the GPS signals and making the plane think that a mountain isn't where the mountain is? And if the terrorist can broadcast multiple spoof signals (spoofing a constellation), they could steer a plane to any location by simply moving the no-fly barrier to herd the plane to the desired (but undesirable) location.
Now will this internet-access for all encourage young people to stay in the country, doing all of their work and research online; or, will this extra exposure encourage more to leave? I'd be interested to hear others' views on this.
At some level, this type of information access may accelerate the flight of the young from rural areas. Increasing the productivity of Indian farmers means the India needs fewer farmers. This has good and bad effects.
On the one hand, increasing the profitability and productivity of Indian farmers will mean more food, cheaper food, and better standards of living for many of people in both rural and urban areas. India will change in the same way that the U.S and other "developed" countries have changed -- shifting from 90% rural to 90% urban.
On the other hand, more productive farmers means less farm employment. This leads to the question of jobs for former farmers. If India cannot create jobs for former farmers, these people will have a much lower quality of living.
The potential for telecommuting is very interesting, but does require certain economic prerequisites. Telecommuting requires every worker to have their own internet terminal and full-time access. This depends on the cost structure of rural internet workers vs. urban non-internet workers. If the labor cost of rural workers plus the cost of internet access is less than the labor cost of urban workers plus the cost of urban real estate and non-internet business processes, then telecommuting will occur. As the price of internet access drops and the wages of urban Indians rises, some types of white-collar employment will shift back to rural areas.
The law permits displays "if that equipment has an interlock device that, when the
motor vehicle is driven, disables the equipment for all uses except as a
visual display as described in paragraphs (1) to (4), inclusive."
I would expect some clever peripherals maker (or hacker) to create an interlock device for computers that appropriately locks the computer when the car is in motion. The easiest design would simply blank the screen (a screen saver would not suffice as it might be construed as entertainment). A more complex design, tied to some navigation app, would force the display of the nav app (which is explicitly permitted under this law) and lock out all other apps and distractions. The device could connect wirelessly via bluetooth or via USB. The only obstacle is the hack into the vehicle system to detect the state of the transmission and engage the interlock when the vehicle is shifted out of the "Park."
The second page of the PDF clearly exempts navigation systems from the ban (it also exempts veiw-enhancing monitors like rear-veiw TVs). What it does not exempt are those ever-enlarging screens for audio systems.
The Cue Cat was a glorified privacy-invading bar code scanner that flopped in the markeplace (even though they gave away 1 million of these beasties). I still have 3 of these things given to me through various magazine subscriptions. If I ever find the time I will have to hack the cat.
I see five conditions under which the free model can work.
1) Price insensitive customers: "Free" can work as long paying customers are tolerant of paying higher prices to support the cost of providing some level of free product or service. For every "free' customer (e.g., who does not pay for the bandwidth & IT to provide the download) there must be a paying customer who is willing to make up the difference. If two companies are equal in quality and features of the product and service offered but one company is "giving it away for free", then the free company will have extra costs from offering that free product/service and have to charge higher prices. If customers are very price sensitive, they will eschew the company that offers "free" wares and pay lower prices at the non-free company.
2) Low total cost of "free": The unreimbursed cost of the free product or service must be low relative to the revenues generated by paying customers. This occurs under a combination of two subconditions. First, the marginal cost of the free product or service might be low (e.g., the modest cost of bandwidth). Second, the fraction of freeloading customers might be low (e.g., something prevents everyone for taking advantage of the free offer). The lower the marginal cost, the higher the tolerable percentage of freeloaders.
3) Customers who contribute services: The viability of free is enhanced by service contributions from customers. Thus the definition of a paying customer goes beyond money -- some customers provide valuable services in the form of code contributions, beta testing reports, and support on discussion forums. These contibuting customers provide a voluntary service in exchange for the "free" product. Although such customers do not help pay the bills, they do reduce the organization's costs (eliminating salaried programmers and helpdesk personnel) and they increase the value of the organization's offerings (thus justifying the payment of subsidies by paying customers).
4) Nonconfident customers: If customers are not confident of their choices, they may prefer the "free" model as a way of try before you buy. At some level many proprietary software companies do this by offering "free" trial versions of their software. The companies give away a time or function-limited version of the product and get paid for the full/unlimited version of the product.
5) Obligatory follow-on purchases: "Free" can also work if acceptance of the free product obligates the customer to buy additional products or services down the road. Giving away the printer in order to gain an ink cartridge customer is a good example of this. The challenge, for the provider of the "free" item, is to segment the customer population to ensure that only heavy users of ink cartridges, for example, will accept the offer of a free item (maintain a low percentage of freeloaders who take the printer but don't use it much).
These are neither mutually required, nor mutually exclusive conditions. Some combination of all 5 can ensure the viability, even the superiority, of the free model over more pay-for-what-you -get business models. I'm sure others here can think of other conditions that enhance the viability of the free model.
Fair Use does not apply if the copyright holder is financially damaged by the event (the education/nonprofit nature of the copying activity is but one of the required tests). Ironically, the advent of legal per-song online music sales makes single-song distribution damaging to copyright holders -- students should buy the songs needed instead. Now if the professor made small excerpts of the relevant songs (for written materials the permissible excerpting is usually about 10-20%) then it might be OK. But a complete song would definitely take a customer away from the copyright holder.
As with all things legal, there are no hard and fast rules, just fuzzy guidelines. It all boils down to what the copyright holder can prove to a judge.
>The speed of light is a function of the medium it is passing through -- light travels more slowly in materials like optical fiber, water, air, etc. than it does in a "vacuum."
Yes, of course it is. However, it is constant within that medium. As I said, no matter who measures it, no matter when or where, the speed of light is a constant. (Yes, it's a constant for that medium if you want to nitpick, but it is a constant.)
We both agree that light travels at a constant speed in a given medium (at least over macroscopic distances -- I have no idea how "fast" light propagates at subatomic distances). Where we may disagree is that today's vacuum is the same medium as yesterday's vacuum. Could the Earth be passing through an errant blob of dark matter or some such phenomena that changes the index of refraction of a vacuum?
What I wonder about, now, is what will happen if we create 4 separate, but equally accurate clocks based on each of the 4 physical forces. It seems to me that current high performance clocks rely on the electromagnetic force (old inaccurate pendulum clocks used gravity). Are there any clocks based on the strong force or weak force?
Perhaps people willing to respond to the survey were more likely to have voted. I see nothing necessarily inconsistent about 30% of SURVEY RESPONDENTS having voted, but only 10% of the student body as a whole (which would include everyone who didn't respond to the survey.)
Yes, voters may have been more willing to answer the survey. Or non-voters may have lied about voting (out of embarassment or a desire to please the pollster). The point is that the survey results were necessarily inconsistent with the true results for the general population (30% voter turnout vs. 10%). Whether the sample is biased (by nonparticipation in the poll) or the answers were biased (by lying to the poll taker) is irrelevant -- the poll contains obvious inconsistencies.
A poll is only valuable to the extent that it is consistent with and representative of the general population. This example illustrates how wrong the results can be despite clever calculations of the statistical margin of error.
The Tech museum in San Jose had an exhibit like this (about 3 years ago?). They had a little rover model running around in a simulated Martian crater. Visitors could control the rover remotely through a closed circuit TV and joystick setup. It was quite fun.
The speed of light is a function of the medium it is passing through -- light travels more slowly in materials like optical fiber, water, air, etc. than it does in a "vacuum." The index of refraction defines this differential between the speed of light in the medium vs. in a "vacuum."
I put "vacuum" in quotes because we are assuming that all vacuums (defined by the absense of normal matter) are created equal. Who knows if "vacuum" is really uniform across the universe. Atomic clock makers already know that the Earth's gravitational field distorts space-time and affects the clock rate and they try to compensate for that. But what if other factors (e.g., density of dark matter, zero-point energy, long-wavelength gravtity waves, etc.) affect the local vacuum or the electomagnetic properties of eletron orbits and change the speed of light and/or change the frequency of cesium atoms? (Note that current gravity wave detectors can only detect high-frequency gravity waves -- I doubt they could detect nanohertz waves).
I suspect that clock makers are forced to assume that certain physical properties are constant (speed of light, electromagnetic force constants, etc.) It seems we have a tautology -- we have a definition of the speed of light that assumes the timebase is constant and a timebase that assumes the speed of light is constant. Perhaps we can use pulsars to check the accuracy of our clocks (assuming that we understand the decelleration of pulsars, stretching of space between us and them , etc.)
The big problem with widely scattered access points is user density (you can't have too many simultaneous users with so few APs) and physical alignment of the directional antennas. But you can use phased array antenna technologies to simultaneously increase the range, number of users, and security of access point installations. By electronically forming a narrow beam, the range increases, interference is reduced, and interception is more difficult. As a side "benefit" a phased array antenna could be used to track the bearing angle to each user and create directional lockouts to prohibit parking lot war drivers.
We've discussed this before here and here about products from Vivato.
A survey held at my university on the day after student government elections showed that 30% of those surveyed had voted. The actual turnout was only 10%. Without the slightest embarassment, the poll takers reported a "margin of error" of 2% on their numbers.
There are three very different types of people in the world: 1) those that lie on surveys, 2) those that avoid surveys, and 3) those that actually participate and tell the truth on surveys. I would suggest that the errors and biases introduced by groups 1 & 2 make the data from group 3 all but meaningless.
One second per year is about 32 parts per billion. Changing the rotation of the Earth by that amount could be accomplished by moving approximately 8260 cubic miles of "Earth" (i.e., material with the same average density as the planet) from the equator to the poles. Moving the material to the mid-latitudes would require moving more material to create the same rotational speed change. For example, we could move about 28,000 cubic miles of Earth from the equator to the 45 degree latitude belt.
28,000 cubic miles of Earth seems like a lot until you spread it out around the Earth. If it were removed from a 1000 mile wide band around the equator, it would be only 6 feet thick. But this still seems like a lot to me because it would have to include changing the mean sea level by 6 feet too and this would be very detectable from orbiting altimeters such as TOPEX.
Hmmm.... Either I've done these calculations incorrectly, or a great deal of material has been moved, or somebody hasn't published their data on changes in the planet's shape.
It seems to me that physicists assume that their atomic clocks keep perfect time. But what if they don't? What if some key physical constants are changing in our neck of the universe. As an engineer I have found that most physical constants aren't (everything is a function of everything, its just an matter of the coefficient). In the case of the atomic clocks, a change of only 32 parts per billion would change the timebase by one second per year. Perhaps a particularly large, long-wavelength gravity wave has stretched spacetime and changed the clocks? Perhaps the four fundamental forces oscillate in undiscovered ways?
IANAP, so perhaps a professional could explain why the atomic clocks must be right -- why a 32 ppb variation in them is impossible (i.e. would manifest itself in other more obvious ways).
Somewhere along the line every application must trust something. At the very least, BIOS settings and environment variables that are owned by deeper layers of the OS must be trusted because they are inaccessible or indecipherable at the application layer. Reaching too far would break encapsulation and create brittle dependencies. An application can only check the variables and direct inputs that it has access to.
I don't argue against validating inputs. Certainly all of the direct inputs to an application should be assumed to be untrustworthy unless a secure checksum validates that the inputs are indentical to some previously validated inputs. Checking inputs (or environmental variables) of immediately adjacent processes is probably also warranted (as a redundant "brother's keeper" policy).
The real problem comes if the OS has a faulty validation methods. (And I won't get into the neccessity of trusting the hardware or bugs such as those that plagued the early Intel 586.00001 processors) If I check the validity of a user, filename, or geographically localized data format (e.g., a date), then my application is dependent on the quality of the OS's validator (and a lack of intervening malware).
If one is worried about losing the kite and camera, then clever use of a weak link could help. Strong kite string would lead to the camera and weaker string would bind the camera to the kite. Excessive force from the wind would severe the link between the kite and camera, not the camera and owner. A parachute tied to a light tertiary line (a rip cord) would yank the camera's parachute when the kite breaks away. (An even better design would design a failure mode into the kite itself so that the kite loses its aerodynamic shape if the wind load becomes too high).
Although there is still a chance of the camera being caught in a kite-eating tree, wind gusts and line breaks need not lead to loss of the camera.
Perhaps one issue is that classic abstract games like chess, checkers, etc. do not need to be replaced multiple times a year. Whereas a dedicated FPS game player might buy multiple games each year, a computer chess player might buy one game every few years. The fixed nature of these classics means there is less incentive for game makers to create yet another version of chess, for example. In fact, I have an older friend who has had the same electronic scrabble game for 10 years - it works fine for her, so why buy another game?
Therefore, classic abstract games have lower sales (but may have higher total install base) because there is less turn-over.
First computer? Depends on the definition
on
First Computers
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· Score: 1
My first computer (in the loosest sense of the other word ) was an HP-25. With 49 steps of program storage it was just enough to play with prime number generators, moon landing simulators, and other simple programs. I got it in the spring of 77. This started my obsession with HP calculators, erm umm computers.
My second computer (or first if your are somewhat picky) was a Timex Sinclair that my wife and I got for sitting through a time share vaction sales presentation in the early 80s. Boy, did we have to sit through all kinds of abuse to get the computer without buying the odious timeshare. But with 8k of memory and a flaky cassette drive, it was not very useful.
My third computer (or first real computer, if you are extremely picky) was a Mac 128k in 1985. Now that was a true computer and I really loved it. We still have it and it still works, but does not see much activity. I'll have to boot the 128k on Jan 24th to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Macs.
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I wonder when the U.S. Internal Revenue Service will require online gaming companies to report the earnings of players? At least some MMORG players are starting to worry about this issue.
The extent that virtual economies let "players" perform virtual jobs and earn virtual money that can be used to buy valuable products and services is the extent such virtual income is taxable. If enough players earn more money online than they pay in monthly fees, then said players are effectively gainfully employeed and profitable. If the virtual money is exchangable for real money, then it becomes much more likely that the IRS could get interested.
Hmmm... do virtual earnings count as earnings in foreign country?
Although we may all rant and rave about the wasted resources in big companies, scale does matter in the PC industry.
1. Amortizing R&D: It costs money to develop and document a new PC (learning the vagaries of drivers, interactions with myriad software packages, and cranky connections to all the possible peripherals that customers might have). The more PCs you sell, the more you get to spread this fixed cost over the customer base. (Even if you, Mr.NewPC Inc., wants to ignore this, the vendors that must supply you with engineering data and support won't).
2. Uncertainty of Sales: If you expect to sell 10,000 PCs tommorow, then the basic statistics of random arrivals of orders means that there is a 95% chance of recieving betwen 9,800 and 10,200 orders. So, you order parts for 200 extra systems (2%) provides cover in case of high demand. If demand is low, you can sell the extra 400 systems in the first few minutes of the following day. On the other hand, if you expect to only sell 25 PCs tomorrow, then these same statistical issues mean that there is a 95% chance of recieving between 15 and 35 orders. To cover the same range, you need to order 40% more parts than the average expected sales and a low demand day leaves you with 20 extra systems (almosty a full day's sales) sitting in inventory.
3. Marketing Costs: If you want to be the next Dell, you need to tell people about you. A nationally broadcast ad costs the same regardless of whether you sell millions of PCs per year or only a few PCs per year. Maybe you can find more targetted ad outlets. Maybe you can rely on word of month (although given that most dissatisfied customers are more vocal than satisfied one, word of mouth is a dicy strategy). EVen if the ad is targetted, the creation of the ad is stil a fixed cost that gets divided by the number of PCs you sell.
I'm not saying that small Mon&Pop PC companies don't have a niche (some customers will always be willing to pay more in order to buy face to face from someone they know locally). I'm only saying that big PC makers have advantages in scale.
Most of the features the telco's add are things that are just not well suited to the small form factor of a cellphone
Amen! The user interface for cellphones epitomizes the worst possible combination of design compromises -- trying to deliver a cognitively rich array of features in an inscrutably tiny screen space. Customers demand the smallest lightest possible handset and then are disappointed when the screen is unreadably small, the buttons are unusably close-packed, and the battery life (under real use) is pathetically short. Perhaps when eyeglass screens and virtual keybaords appear, then we will be able to enjoy full internet services in a visually large space.
The layered approach to internet infrastructure is a great technological solution for decoupling the physical mechanisms for moving data, the protocols for managing data movements, and the high-level applications that rely on that data. Layers create natural zones of standardization and enable any application to run on any network.
But that technological architecture is a business model nightmare. All of the costs reside in the lowest physical layers. All those wires, fibers, amplifiers, and switches cost big bucks. Unfortunately, all of the value lies in the highest, application layers. Users want the application and don't care about the physical infrastructure. A layered architecture gaurantees that users don't have to care because the lower layers are interchangable and invisible.
The result is cut-throat price competition among infrastructure service providers (and the associated miles of dark fiber, negative earnings, high debt, and bankruptcies). Meanwhile, the application providers reap the profits while the infrastructure providers can't justify the expense of solving the last mile problem.
Its not that users don't want the telco's acronym soup of next-gen features, it's that they don't want to pay for those features. Providers are desperately seeking the fabled "killer app" that makes subscribers shell out another $29.95/mo. But consumers are tired of expanding monthly bills. And it doesn't help when companies slather on an encyclopedia of restrictions, fees, and service charges.
But you overlooked a small point. Tech tends to concentrate in urban centers because that's where the talent pool is. (And of course, the talent is available only in urban centers because that's where the jobs are.
Good point! You are right that engineering/programming jobs will flow into urban areas because of the high concentration of educated people and that educated people will flow into urban areas because of the high concentration of high-paying jobs. Yet telecommuting enables many other types of jobs that could be hosted in far flung, low-cost, rural areas.
The most likely rural white collar telecommuting jobs would be unskilled or low-skill ones like call centers, entry-level customer support (with escalation to the more skilled, more expensive urban helpdesks), basic data entry, etc. Back in the late 90s British Telecom used telecommuting rural Scottish housewives for operator assistance. And in the U.S., some call centers relocated to mid-West farm towns for their lower cost of labor. Many of these jobs require little more than basic literacy (the ability to read a phone script or simple helpdesk resolution menu) and a VoIP internet terminal.
What's to stop terrorists for distorting the GPS signals and making the plane think that a mountain isn't where the mountain is? And if the terrorist can broadcast multiple spoof signals (spoofing a constellation), they could steer a plane to any location by simply moving the no-fly barrier to herd the plane to the desired (but undesirable) location.
Now will this internet-access for all encourage young people to stay in the country, doing all of their work and research online; or, will this extra exposure encourage more to leave? I'd be interested to hear others' views on this.
At some level, this type of information access may accelerate the flight of the young from rural areas. Increasing the productivity of Indian farmers means the India needs fewer farmers. This has good and bad effects.
On the one hand, increasing the profitability and productivity of Indian farmers will mean more food, cheaper food, and better standards of living for many of people in both rural and urban areas. India will change in the same way that the U.S and other "developed" countries have changed -- shifting from 90% rural to 90% urban.
On the other hand, more productive farmers means less farm employment. This leads to the question of jobs for former farmers. If India cannot create jobs for former farmers, these people will have a much lower quality of living.
The potential for telecommuting is very interesting, but does require certain economic prerequisites. Telecommuting requires every worker to have their own internet terminal and full-time access. This depends on the cost structure of rural internet workers vs. urban non-internet workers. If the labor cost of rural workers plus the cost of internet access is less than the labor cost of urban workers plus the cost of urban real estate and non-internet business processes, then telecommuting will occur. As the price of internet access drops and the wages of urban Indians rises, some types of white-collar employment will shift back to rural areas.
The law permits displays "if that equipment has an interlock device that, when the motor vehicle is driven, disables the equipment for all uses except as a visual display as described in paragraphs (1) to (4), inclusive."
I would expect some clever peripherals maker (or hacker) to create an interlock device for computers that appropriately locks the computer when the car is in motion. The easiest design would simply blank the screen (a screen saver would not suffice as it might be construed as entertainment). A more complex design, tied to some navigation app, would force the display of the nav app (which is explicitly permitted under this law) and lock out all other apps and distractions. The device could connect wirelessly via bluetooth or via USB. The only obstacle is the hack into the vehicle system to detect the state of the transmission and engage the interlock when the vehicle is shifted out of the "Park."
The second page of the PDF clearly exempts navigation systems from the ban (it also exempts veiw-enhancing monitors like rear-veiw TVs). What it does not exempt are those ever-enlarging screens for audio systems.
The Cue Cat was a glorified privacy-invading bar code scanner that flopped in the markeplace (even though they gave away 1 million of these beasties). I still have 3 of these things given to me through various magazine subscriptions. If I ever find the time I will have to hack the cat.
I see five conditions under which the free model can work.
1) Price insensitive customers: "Free" can work as long paying customers are tolerant of paying higher prices to support the cost of providing some level of free product or service. For every "free' customer (e.g., who does not pay for the bandwidth & IT to provide the download) there must be a paying customer who is willing to make up the difference. If two companies are equal in quality and features of the product and service offered but one company is "giving it away for free", then the free company will have extra costs from offering that free product/service and have to charge higher prices. If customers are very price sensitive, they will eschew the company that offers "free" wares and pay lower prices at the non-free company.
2) Low total cost of "free": The unreimbursed cost of the free product or service must be low relative to the revenues generated by paying customers. This occurs under a combination of two subconditions. First, the marginal cost of the free product or service might be low (e.g., the modest cost of bandwidth). Second, the fraction of freeloading customers might be low (e.g., something prevents everyone for taking advantage of the free offer). The lower the marginal cost, the higher the tolerable percentage of freeloaders.
3) Customers who contribute services: The viability of free is enhanced by service contributions from customers. Thus the definition of a paying customer goes beyond money -- some customers provide valuable services in the form of code contributions, beta testing reports, and support on discussion forums. These contibuting customers provide a voluntary service in exchange for the "free" product. Although such customers do not help pay the bills, they do reduce the organization's costs (eliminating salaried programmers and helpdesk personnel) and they increase the value of the organization's offerings (thus justifying the payment of subsidies by paying customers).
4) Nonconfident customers: If customers are not confident of their choices, they may prefer the "free" model as a way of try before you buy. At some level many proprietary software companies do this by offering "free" trial versions of their software. The companies give away a time or function-limited version of the product and get paid for the full/unlimited version of the product.
5) Obligatory follow-on purchases: "Free" can also work if acceptance of the free product obligates the customer to buy additional products or services down the road. Giving away the printer in order to gain an ink cartridge customer is a good example of this. The challenge, for the provider of the "free" item, is to segment the customer population to ensure that only heavy users of ink cartridges, for example, will accept the offer of a free item (maintain a low percentage of freeloaders who take the printer but don't use it much).
These are neither mutually required, nor mutually exclusive conditions. Some combination of all 5 can ensure the viability, even the superiority, of the free model over more pay-for-what-you -get business models. I'm sure others here can think of other conditions that enhance the viability of the free model.
Fair Use does not apply if the copyright holder is financially damaged by the event (the education/nonprofit nature of the copying activity is but one of the required tests). Ironically, the advent of legal per-song online music sales makes single-song distribution damaging to copyright holders -- students should buy the songs needed instead. Now if the professor made small excerpts of the relevant songs (for written materials the permissible excerpting is usually about 10-20%) then it might be OK. But a complete song would definitely take a customer away from the copyright holder.
As with all things legal, there are no hard and fast rules, just fuzzy guidelines. It all boils down to what the copyright holder can prove to a judge.
>The speed of light is a function of the medium it is passing through -- light travels more slowly in materials like optical fiber, water, air, etc. than it does in a "vacuum."
Yes, of course it is. However, it is constant within that medium. As I said, no matter who measures it, no matter when or where, the speed of light is a constant. (Yes, it's a constant for that medium if you want to nitpick, but it is a constant.)
We both agree that light travels at a constant speed in a given medium (at least over macroscopic distances -- I have no idea how "fast" light propagates at subatomic distances). Where we may disagree is that today's vacuum is the same medium as yesterday's vacuum. Could the Earth be passing through an errant blob of dark matter or some such phenomena that changes the index of refraction of a vacuum?
What I wonder about, now, is what will happen if we create 4 separate, but equally accurate clocks based on each of the 4 physical forces. It seems to me that current high performance clocks rely on the electromagnetic force (old inaccurate pendulum clocks used gravity). Are there any clocks based on the strong force or weak force?
Perhaps people willing to respond to the survey were more likely to have voted. I see nothing necessarily inconsistent about 30% of SURVEY RESPONDENTS having voted, but only 10% of the student body as a whole (which would include everyone who didn't respond to the survey.)
Yes, voters may have been more willing to answer the survey. Or non-voters may have lied about voting (out of embarassment or a desire to please the pollster). The point is that the survey results were necessarily inconsistent with the true results for the general population (30% voter turnout vs. 10%). Whether the sample is biased (by nonparticipation in the poll) or the answers were biased (by lying to the poll taker) is irrelevant -- the poll contains obvious inconsistencies.
A poll is only valuable to the extent that it is consistent with and representative of the general population. This example illustrates how wrong the results can be despite clever calculations of the statistical margin of error.
The Tech museum in San Jose had an exhibit like this (about 3 years ago?). They had a little rover model running around in a simulated Martian crater. Visitors could control the rover remotely through a closed circuit TV and joystick setup. It was quite fun.
The speed of light is a function of the medium it is passing through -- light travels more slowly in materials like optical fiber, water, air, etc. than it does in a "vacuum." The index of refraction defines this differential between the speed of light in the medium vs. in a "vacuum."
I put "vacuum" in quotes because we are assuming that all vacuums (defined by the absense of normal matter) are created equal. Who knows if "vacuum" is really uniform across the universe. Atomic clock makers already know that the Earth's gravitational field distorts space-time and affects the clock rate and they try to compensate for that. But what if other factors (e.g., density of dark matter, zero-point energy, long-wavelength gravtity waves, etc.) affect the local vacuum or the electomagnetic properties of eletron orbits and change the speed of light and/or change the frequency of cesium atoms? (Note that current gravity wave detectors can only detect high-frequency gravity waves -- I doubt they could detect nanohertz waves).
I suspect that clock makers are forced to assume that certain physical properties are constant (speed of light, electromagnetic force constants, etc.) It seems we have a tautology -- we have a definition of the speed of light that assumes the timebase is constant and a timebase that assumes the speed of light is constant. Perhaps we can use pulsars to check the accuracy of our clocks (assuming that we understand the decelleration of pulsars, stretching of space between us and them , etc.)
The big problem with widely scattered access points is user density (you can't have too many simultaneous users with so few APs) and physical alignment of the directional antennas. But you can use phased array antenna technologies to simultaneously increase the range, number of users, and security of access point installations. By electronically forming a narrow beam, the range increases, interference is reduced, and interception is more difficult. As a side "benefit" a phased array antenna could be used to track the bearing angle to each user and create directional lockouts to prohibit parking lot war drivers.
We've discussed this before here and here about products from Vivato.
A survey held at my university on the day after student government elections showed that 30% of those surveyed had voted. The actual turnout was only 10%. Without the slightest embarassment, the poll takers reported a "margin of error" of 2% on their numbers.
There are three very different types of people in the world: 1) those that lie on surveys, 2) those that avoid surveys, and 3) those that actually participate and tell the truth on surveys. I would suggest that the errors and biases introduced by groups 1 & 2 make the data from group 3 all but meaningless.
One second per year is about 32 parts per billion. Changing the rotation of the Earth by that amount could be accomplished by moving approximately 8260 cubic miles of "Earth" (i.e., material with the same average density as the planet) from the equator to the poles. Moving the material to the mid-latitudes would require moving more material to create the same rotational speed change. For example, we could move about 28,000 cubic miles of Earth from the equator to the 45 degree latitude belt.
28,000 cubic miles of Earth seems like a lot until you spread it out around the Earth. If it were removed from a 1000 mile wide band around the equator, it would be only 6 feet thick. But this still seems like a lot to me because it would have to include changing the mean sea level by 6 feet too and this would be very detectable from orbiting altimeters such as TOPEX.
Hmmm.... Either I've done these calculations incorrectly, or a great deal of material has been moved, or somebody hasn't published their data on changes in the planet's shape.
It seems to me that physicists assume that their atomic clocks keep perfect time. But what if they don't? What if some key physical constants are changing in our neck of the universe. As an engineer I have found that most physical constants aren't (everything is a function of everything, its just an matter of the coefficient). In the case of the atomic clocks, a change of only 32 parts per billion would change the timebase by one second per year. Perhaps a particularly large, long-wavelength gravity wave has stretched spacetime and changed the clocks? Perhaps the four fundamental forces oscillate in undiscovered ways?
IANAP, so perhaps a professional could explain why the atomic clocks must be right -- why a 32 ppb variation in them is impossible (i.e. would manifest itself in other more obvious ways).
Somewhere along the line every application must trust something. At the very least, BIOS settings and environment variables that are owned by deeper layers of the OS must be trusted because they are inaccessible or indecipherable at the application layer. Reaching too far would break encapsulation and create brittle dependencies. An application can only check the variables and direct inputs that it has access to.
I don't argue against validating inputs. Certainly all of the direct inputs to an application should be assumed to be untrustworthy unless a secure checksum validates that the inputs are indentical to some previously validated inputs. Checking inputs (or environmental variables) of immediately adjacent processes is probably also warranted (as a redundant "brother's keeper" policy).
The real problem comes if the OS has a faulty validation methods. (And I won't get into the neccessity of trusting the hardware or bugs such as those that plagued the early Intel 586.00001 processors) If I check the validity of a user, filename, or geographically localized data format (e.g., a date), then my application is dependent on the quality of the OS's validator (and a lack of intervening malware).
If one is worried about losing the kite and camera, then clever use of a weak link could help. Strong kite string would lead to the camera and weaker string would bind the camera to the kite. Excessive force from the wind would severe the link between the kite and camera, not the camera and owner. A parachute tied to a light tertiary line (a rip cord) would yank the camera's parachute when the kite breaks away. (An even better design would design a failure mode into the kite itself so that the kite loses its aerodynamic shape if the wind load becomes too high).
Although there is still a chance of the camera being caught in a kite-eating tree, wind gusts and line breaks need not lead to loss of the camera.
Perhaps one issue is that classic abstract games like chess, checkers, etc. do not need to be replaced multiple times a year. Whereas a dedicated FPS game player might buy multiple games each year, a computer chess player might buy one game every few years. The fixed nature of these classics means there is less incentive for game makers to create yet another version of chess, for example. In fact, I have an older friend who has had the same electronic scrabble game for 10 years - it works fine for her, so why buy another game?
Therefore, classic abstract games have lower sales (but may have higher total install base) because there is less turn-over.
My first computer (in the loosest sense of the other word ) was an HP-25. With 49 steps of program storage it was just enough to play with prime number generators, moon landing simulators, and other simple programs. I got it in the spring of 77. This started my obsession with HP calculators, erm umm computers.
My second computer (or first if your are somewhat picky) was a Timex Sinclair that my wife and I got for sitting through a time share vaction sales presentation in the early 80s. Boy, did we have to sit through all kinds of abuse to get the computer without buying the odious timeshare. But with 8k of memory and a flaky cassette drive, it was not very useful.
My third computer (or first real computer, if you are extremely picky) was a Mac 128k in 1985. Now that was a true computer and I really loved it. We still have it and it still works, but does not see much activity. I'll have to boot the 128k on Jan 24th to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Macs.